by Edward Platt
He had spent the morning working on the turbine with a team of technicians. The idea of climbing up the inside of one of the tall, narrow towers, which seemed no more securely rooted than a metal buoy spinning in the current, made me feel dizzy, in more than one way. It was potentially dangerous, Nicholson said, but only because you were so isolated. But offshore work was always potentially dangerous. He had been working on an oil rig stationed halfway between the Orkneys and the Norwegian coast when the nearby Piper Alpha rig blew up in 1988. One hundred and sixty-seven people were killed. Standards had improved so much since then that you were safer in offshore oil and gas installations than on a building site onshore, and he predicted that the wind industry would soon catch up, as it continued the process of colonization that had produced successive waves of marine installation – from forts and oil platforms to the giant yellow turbines of the London Array – and generated the data that made the reconstruction of Doggerland possible.
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Much still remains obscure. Doggerland is ‘one of the most enigmatic archaeological landscapes in the world,’ write Gaffney, Fitch and Smith. They recognize that their work will galvanize fantasists as well as scientists, for it shows that the nineteenth-century occultists who were preoccupied by the idea of lost lands beneath the seas were not as deluded as they might have seemed. We did not evolve on the continent of Atlantis, but we live on the edge of a drowned world and we are descended from its inhabitants.
Yet the rediscovery of Doggerland was not only an act of forensic skill; it was also a feat of imaginative empathy. Despite their warnings against reaching for conclusions that the evidence did not support, the archaeologists did not overlook the human dimensions of their discovery: they made me appreciate the sense of loss and fear the inhabitants of Doggerland must have felt as the waters rose, though, as the boat drove on through the mist, I reminded myself that there was at least one sense in which they were better off than we were. The water from the retreating glaciers that poured into the sea, and drowned their ancestral homes, also created new territories on the low-lying land to the west and the north, which they had previously ignored. They had somewhere else to go. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are no comparable havens to explore.
6: The Great Tide
THE EAST COAST, AFTER THE STORM: THE FENS & JAYWICK, DECEMBER 2013
I was in the Fens on 5 December – the day the weather turned. Overnight, there had been reports of a storm approaching: two people were killed by falling power cables in Scotland and there was flooding on the east coast.
Yet, even if I hadn’t been warned of the storm’s approach, I couldn’t have failed to notice it; it was a cold, wet day, and the wind gusting through the Fens was so strong that it was hard to stand up in it. When it was blowing in my face, I had to lean forward to walk into it, in a tilted posture that seemed all the more pronounced in a landscape where the embankments of the rivers are the only vertical structures. When it was behind me, it hurried me along, lifting me off my feet from time to time, like a bouncer ushering me towards the exit. It gathered up the clouds and stacked them on the horizon in the south; I kept thinking that the dark mass beyond the spire of Ely Cathedral was a range of hills, though I should have noticed that it was getting bigger and darker as the day passed.
My guide for the day made me feel it was his pleasure to show me round the country that he loved. John Martin’s family had farmed land in the South Levels since the eighteenth century, and played a part in draining it as well. William Martin was the first chairman of the Littleport and Downham Internal Drainage Board in 1845, and other Martins filled the role before John took it on, in 1971. Yet the chain of memory in his family goes back even further.
He lived ten miles outside Cambridge, on a long, straight road lined with industrial estates that carried the spirit of the modern city into the countryside. Yet Denny Abbey Farm stood among a cluster of buildings more preoccupied with the past: there was a partially restored abbey, built on one of the ‘islands’ of high ground that supported the first settlements in the Fens, as they had in the Levels, and a museum of rural life. The house lay beyond an open-sided stable in which there was a row of farm vehicles used for shooting. It was a modern building, white walled and regular, like the Wards’ withy factory, though it stood in a courtyard enclosed by old stone walls.
‘Well done!’ John Martin called out from an upstairs window when I drew up at the front door, as if negotiating the layers of history in which the house was embedded required an act of time travel, rather than the simple matter of plugging a postcode into a satnav or looking at a map. He was a former High Sheriff of Cambridge, and a friend of a friend of my parents. I had been told that he was interested in water management and drainage, and that it would be worth my while to meet him. I wasn’t disappointed.
He drove me through the Fens to the house where he grew up, near the Denver Complex, the system of locks and gates that sorts the water from the rivers of the Fens and holds back the water from the sea. It was a good day to be introduced to the landscape of the Fens, for the approaching storm was a reminder of its fragility: ‘You do not need to remind a Fenman of the effects of heavy inland rainfall or the combination of a spring tide and a strong nor’easter,’ wrote Graham Swift, in Waterland, his great novel of Fenland life – and no one fitted the description of a Fenman better than John Martin.
Before we left the house, he showed me his collection of maps and pamphlets devoted to the topography of the Fens and its drainage system. There were scrapbooks documenting the floods of 1938 and 1947, which he had witnessed, and a personal memoir of an even earlier flood, which one of his ancestors had lived through. ‘Ah – how well I remember that day – 80 – no, 81 years ago,’ Joseph Martin’s memoir of the ‘Great Drowned’ began, conversationally, as he recalled the day when ‘the Bank broke and all Littleport Fen was flooded.’
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Late in the afternoon of Saturday, 11 September 1796, ‘a man on horseback came round to our Farm, calling out, “the Banks broke, the Banks broke”,’ Joseph Martin said. Everyone knew what that meant. His father moved the stock to high ground and his mother and sister worked through the night and the next day to save the corn and the oats. They got the corn ‘all sent away and only just in time, for the water was rising so fast that the roads were soon under water . . . It was a terrible time, for the wind blew and the rain came down in torrents, and in a few days, there were 30,000 acres in that district under water.’
By Wednesday morning, their house had flooded. They were preparing to leave, but, overnight, the water froze. It wasn’t strong enough to walk on, and yet you couldn’t push through it by boat. They stayed in the house, ‘quite away from any other, with the water 7 ft. deep all around us.’ The front door was frozen open; Joseph Martin used to put his skates on in the downstairs room and skate ‘about the house – in doors and out – all day long.’
They were frozen in for ten days, and the weather got worse before it got better. ‘It hailed and rained in great torrents, and the ice began to break up and float in great pieces’ that banged against the house. One night, ‘when the wind roared and the ice and lumber kept knocking against the walls’, the house ‘shook and groaned’, and his mother ‘who had kept up so bravely till then, quite broke down and said we must certainly be washed away.’
Yet, the next morning, the thaw had begun. They looked out across ‘one great sheet of water, as far as the eye could reach; only broken here and there by a tree top, a hay stack, or the roof of a cattle shed, with the great blocks of ice floating about . . .’
At midday, they spotted two black specks on the horizon. As they came closer, they saw they were lighters, punted through the mud banks and the tops of trees and all the other half-submerged obstacles in the water by men from Littleport.
The family climbed into the boats with the few possessions they could take, but they were so low in the water that they thought the wind would tip them o
ver if they turned broadside. They had to break the ice as they went, and they made slow progress, ‘constantly meeting and passing great heaps of things that the flood had washed away.’ They couldn’t reach Littleport before night, and they stayed in a farmhouse that had become a hostel for people and a stable for their sheep and cattle. They went back to the house six months later to rescue their belongings, but they never lived there again. By the time Joseph sat down to dictate his memories, it was occupied by a labourer’s family. ‘I have seen other floods since then and after I was grown up and in business for myself – had my own farm under water once,’ he said, ‘but somehow, I seem to remember this – the Great Drowned as we always called it – best of all.’
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The floods of 1947 left an equally strong impression on John Martin. His father had taken him to the edge of the lake that had spread out through the breaches in the banks of the rivers, and told him to make sure it never happened again. He took the injunction seriously: he became the chairman of the Regional Flood Committee that protected the east coast, from the shores of the Humber to the Thames. He coordinated local committees, went ‘cap-in-hand’ to Whitehall to raise money, and trained the local people who had to decide whether or not to evacuate when they received warnings of the kind that were being transmitted along the east coast as we sat at the table in his dining room, surrounded by the archive of material he had produced. ‘If you do it unnecessarily, then, after the third time, they won’t go,’ he said.
As we drove through the Fens, he kept pointing out the places where the water had reached in 1947, but I got a better sense of how it might have spread, and how hard it would be to contain it once it overflowed, when we reached Ten Mile Bank, the raised channel that carries the southern part of the River Ouse from Littleport to Denver Sluice.
In most places, rivers are sunken channels, but in the ‘upside down world of the Fens’, as in the Somerset Levels, they ride high above the fields. Ten Mile Bank refers to its length, but when I stood at the bottom of the dyke and looked up the slope, the name seemed to invoke its height. I couldn’t see the river from below, and it was a surprise to scramble up the bank and find myself standing beside a wide channel of grey water. The wind was worrying at the boats tethered to the bank and stirring the surface into choppy waves. Yet it was only when I turned round that I saw how vulnerable the low-lying land would be to the mass of water contained within the banks of the river.
The fields were daubed in shades of dark brown and soft black that matched the colour of the sky. Distances were hard to judge, for there was no high ground to provide perspective, and the only dabs of contrast were the pale green patches of newly planted crops. There weren’t even hedgerows to break up the view; the field boundaries were ditches that linked the pipes buried beneath the soil to the pumping stations that lifted the water into the rivers. Since there were no animals, there were no stables, barns or troughs. Here and there, a wavering twist of black climbed into the sky, rising and turning in constant swirls, like the twisters that blow through the Fens when they dry out: they were flocks of starlings, feasting on fields that had been left fallow to attract them, and they were the only vertical markers to be seen, before the land rose again to form the banks of the Hundred Foot Drain, or the New Bedford River, the second of two channels that the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden had dug in the seventeenth century, to take the River Ouse in a straight line across the Fens to the sea.
Vermuyden’s attempt to drain the Fens was largely successful, though it had one consequence that no one had expected, which made his gains harder to maintain: peat contracts as it dries out, by as much as twelve inches in the first year and a slower rate thereafter, and, as the fields ‘shrank away from the channels that drained them’, they had to find new ways of lifting the water into the raised rivers. Steam, diesel and electric engines supplanted windmills, in a sequence you could track through the stewardship of the Martin family. Yet lifting the water into the rivers was not the greatest challenge: ‘Our problem is not Fen drainage,’ one of John’s pamphlets said. The problem was the strength of the river embankments, which were required to hold an ever-greater weight of water.
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The floods of 1947 were considered particularly cruel. ‘The war’s over. But the hardship’s not over. The ration book still stands on the mantelpiece. And show us, please, the fruits of our victory,’ wrote Graham Swift, in Waterland. Two million sheep and lambs died in the hills and 30,000 cattle on the plains during the winter snows, and, when they thawed, heavy rain and meltwater overwhelmed the rivers. ‘Never in any history of which we have record, have nearly all the main rivers of the south, the Midlands and the north-east of England swollen into such deep flood simultaneously,’ said Harvest Home: The Official Story of the Great Floods of 1947, which describes the battle to contain the rivers of the Fens as if it was a continuation of the struggle to win the war.
At Worcester, the Severn rose ten feet (three metres) in twenty-four hours. The Thames overflowed at Windsor, and gales struck London, killing two people. Water flowed through the streets of Bow, though there was none to drink, for the treatment plant flooded. In Yorkshire, the pit village of Selby was ‘attacked by the Ouse from the north and by the Aire from the south’, and became ‘a little Venice almost overnight,’ says Harvest Home. There were 2,800 houses in the ‘town that drowned’; 2,000 of them flooded.
In the Fens, ‘a long and weary struggle’ to contain the rivers began, for the modern consensus that it is better to let farmland flood if it means saving houses downstream did not prevail when the country was struggling to feed itself.
The thaw in the catchment of the Great Ouse, the main river that runs through the Fens, began on 10 March. On the eastern side of the Fens, the water rose eight feet (two and a half metres) in four days, and on 14 March, the call went out to ‘stand by the banks’. The first breach was in the Great Ouse, at Over, which had never been known to overflow. Two gangs of workmen and prisoners worked on the banks for two days, dragging bags of clay to the wave-washed summit. The wind was so strong they couldn’t hear each other speak, and ‘they could advance only by staggering, bent nearly double.’
Nobody saw the bank burst, for the men had retreated, but people in houses that had flooded knew that something had given way. As the water in the Great Ouse poured through a breach in the bank, the level went down. The water rushed out into Willingham Fen, as far as the banks of the New Bedford River, Vermuyden’s second channel, which was also threatening to overflow. One farmer rowed out to his house and rowed through the holes the waves had torn through it.
Soldiers and prisoners were drafted in to help the local labourers, as gale-force winds whipped the water into waves that broke against the collapsing banks and threw up sheets of ice-cold spray that threatened to sweep away the workmen. They were reduced to ‘clinging to a fence or whatever else would yield a handhold.’ In some places, the wind was so strong that it blew away the bags of clay brought in to reinforce the banks. Yet the Fenmen struggled on, facing ‘darkness and a wind of hurricane strength, with their forces scattered over nearly 250 miles of threatened flood-banks, any of which might yield at any point and at any moment.’
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The Martins thought the top floor of their house would be above water if the Ely Ouse burst its banks in 1947, but they did not want to see their theory tested. By the time the Ely Ouse flows past White House Farm, which stands beside the road, no more than a few metres from its banks, it has been swollen by several other rivers. The banks of one of its tributaries, the River Lark, were under threat, but the workers managed to save them. ‘Defeats at other points provide more dramatic stories, but this success on the Lark is a greater story,’ said Harvest Home, in its morale-boosting tone: ‘Here we won.’ A breach in the banks of the River Wissey, which flows into the Ouse opposite White House Farm, might have helped them, too, for it gave way a mile upstream. Instead of flowing into the Ouse beside White House Farm, th
e water spilled into Hilgay Fen, ‘transforming it into a rising lake.’
The culverts that carried surface water from the Fens, under the road, from Ely to Kings Lynn, had already been blocked, but there was a mile-long section that the water could wash over at any point. Workmen started to build a wall of sandbags five feet (one and a half metres) high along its length. By Thursday morning, the water was lapping at the base of the bags in the wall. The water was rising six and a quarter inches (sixteen centimetres) an hour, and the wall had to be built at a rate to keep pace with it. It held all night, even as the weather worsened and a south-westerly gale whipped the floodwaters into waves that battered at the wall of bags with the force of the sea.
The wall was never breached, but the Wissey could not be contained. The water burst through one of the culverts beneath the road ‘with a thundering roar, sweeping an amphibious truck half a mile across the fen, tearing down the brickwork of the culvert and . . . clawing out a great hole in the road beneath the wall,’ writes Harvest Home. There were two houses nearby: the wave tore away the side of the nearest one, scattering its furniture across the Fen, while the owner of the other felt the ‘place lift beneath him’.
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In total, 37,000 acres of land would be left under water. The flood was ‘by far the greatest and most sudden in living memory,’ said the chief engineer of the River Great Ouse Catchment Board. ‘It may well have been the greatest flood since the Fens were first drained.’ And it wasn’t only John Martin that it galvanized into action; it inspired the authorities to complete the drainage scheme that Cornelius Vermuyden had conceived, and largely carried out. In 1638, he had sketched a relief channel that would complete his plan, and, nearly three hundred years later, it was finally built. John Martin attended the opening ceremony in 1961, and, since then, the South Level had felt relatively secure.
